Today's multi-media services are designed to be delivered to—and rendered upon—a single device, such as videos played on a single device's screen while audio, whose signals are interleaved with the video information, is played over that same device's speakers. However, if a given user's device is not capable of rendering a full experience due to technical or network limitations, there is currently no way for that user to experience the media. Services may be encoded for increasing experience levels. With respect to downloading, the user's device may not have a network interface capable of receiving the full multimedia experience over a single network connection, or the device itself may not have input-output capabilities to render the full experience. In addition, with respect to uplink to server and device capabilities, they may not have sufficient bandwidth for sensed data to be sent up to the server and/or the device itself may not be able to gather from users, sense, or post all the data required by the service. Hence there is a need for determining how to arrange for, manage, and deliver a service when the service's requirements exceed the capabilities of a single network connection and a single mobile device. Indeed, collaborative, cooperative, competitive, head-to-head play are now intrinsic parts of the mobile culture, as evidenced by devices and applications such as those by Sony Corporation, Apple®, Nintendo® and Microsoft®.
Prior solutions have failed to address or incorporate the notion of network capabilities and the stylized set-up of mobile “parties” using cellular devices (by “party” we mean a set of users coming together to experience multimedia content; entertainment is the main use case but the content may not be limited to entertainment and could be related to business or operations of any kind, for example, surveillance, dance, healthcare, etc.). Further, prior solutions do not detect when services can spontaneously be available and associate them with capabilities of surrounding networks and/or mobile devices. Prior solutions do not support user interfaces for party set-up and do not address resynchronization through user interface gestures. Some mobile gaming and entertainment systems use short range communications (such as Bluetooth®) as a means to synchronize so-called “head to head” game-play. Streaming multiple data streams and multicast to multiple devices is a known art, such as the use of a session server to manage the transmission of separate streams.
However, the concept of mobile ad hoc parties in which cellular phones or other mobile and fixed devices come together to deliver a unified service in which each plays a distinct role, has not been examined.